That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

It is so tiring to hate someone you love.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

All success cloaks a surrender

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.